Reading Rushdie in Iraq – The Atlantic
In the spring of 1989, a 21-year-old Iraqi university student named Ali came home and made a shocking discovery: On the living-room table of his familys home was a copy of The Satanic Verses. A friend of Alis father had smuggled Salman Rushdies controversial book from London, removing its distinctive blue cover and hiding it in his luggage. This was like finding a bomb.
Ali, a shy and curious young man with a passion for reading, was thrilled to be holding such a forbidden object. Ayatollah Khomeini had recently issued his notorious fatwa condemning Rushdie to death, and protests by Muslims were erupting around the world against what they claimed was an intolerable insult to their faith. Crowds gathered in public squares to burn the book; bookstores were being firebombed. Alis father, a relatively liberal man, had taken a risk just by letting a copy enter his home.
Ali, who left Iraq more than a decade ago, told me recently that he could still remember the intense excitement he felt on first touching the pages. But The Satanic Verses was no easy novel. Ali had studied English for years, but Rushdies language was sophisticated and inventive, so much so that reading it required great mental effort and frequent recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary, which he kept beside him. He took notes as he went, partly out of habit and partly because his fathers friend wanted the book back in a week. When he finished it, he was exhausted.
What Ali remembers most is a feeling of admiration for the depth of Rushdies knowledge and the richness of his imagination. Rushdie had used religious names and narratives like scraps of cloth and woven them together, past and present, into a bizarre, multicolored garment. It was clear enough that Rushdie was deliberately provoking Islamic sensibilities with his overlapping of sacred and profane. But Alia practicing Muslim at the timewas not offended. It seemed to him that Rushdies intention was not to spit in the face of believers but to create stories that teased and fused the cultural narratives of East and West. The books broader message, as far as he could understand it, seemed true to Ali: that good and bad mingle. They fight each other at times, but they cant always be easily separated.
Read: Salman Rushdie and the cult of offense
Ali may have been exactly the kind of reader Rushdie most hoped for, someone who would be simultaneously challenged and inspired by his fictions. Sadly, The Satanic Verses had something like the opposite effect for much of the world, a hardening of perspectives. The outcry set a pattern that has been repeated with depressing regularity in the decades since, a kind of passion play that entrenches resentments on every side. Some sacrilegious image or comment or artwork made in Copenhagen or London is discovered and then rebroadcast in Cairo or Tehran. Threats are issued, protests ensue, people die.
It is tempting to see these outbreaks as an unavoidable feature of globalizationa measure of the gap between a secularized society, where the idea of blasphemy is a joke, and a more traditional one, where it remains a powerful taboo enshrined in law. But the conflicts are often amplified by some opportunistic cleric or politician looking for excuses to stir up anger and throw red meat to hisit is always menpolitical or religious base. These demagogues are enabled, to some extent, by the relative absence of wide-ranging readers like my friend Ali in the Middle East. Go into a library or bookstore in that part of the world, and you will see just how limited the offerings are.
They may not know it, but the people of the Middle East are surrounded by homegrown provocateurs more dangerous than Rushdie. During the years I lived in Baghdad, a book began making the rounds among the countrys shrunken elite: The Personality of Muhammad or the Elucidation of the Holy Enigma, by the Iraqi scholar and poet Maruf al Rusafi. The book presents a demythologized reading of Muhammads life and work, arguing that he was a great political and military leader, but nothing more. Rusafis book was written in the early 20th century. If it were published today, the author would likely need an army of bodyguards.
There are many other examples. The medieval Persian poet Abu Nuwas wrote poems about wine drinking and sex with both men and women; he often invokes Quranic imagery in an ironic way that would seem scandalous today. But no one has issued any fatwas against these writers. A bronze statue of Rusafi has stood unmolested by a bridge in Baghdad for decades, outlasting several wars and invasions. As for Abu Nuwas, he is revered (though not much read) to this day in Iraq. One of Baghdads most beloved and beautiful streets, along the Tigris river, is named for him. When Abu Nuwas died in the year 814, the reigning caliph declared Gods curse on anyone who has insulted him.
Read: All because Salman Rushdie wrote a book
Soon after I met Ali, one of the deadliest of the blasphemy crises broke out, its trigger a set of cartoons published in Denmark in 2005 that depicted the Prophet Muhammad. We were working in the Baghdad bureau of The New York Times, I as a reporter, and he as a news editor. Ali is an instinctively gentle, kind manit is one of the first things you notice about himand he was horrified by the violence of the protests. But he was also upset by the way the controversy was being framed in the Western press. He felt that there was an absolutism about free speech that worsened the problem. I remember him asking me if it wouldnt be possible to carve out some kind of religious exception to free speech, to avoid conflicts like this one.
I got the sense that Ali was groping for a balance between his own Muslim upbringing and the more secular perspectives hed been exposed to as an adult. It wasnt easy. The years after the Rushdie fatwa had brought a series of wars and disasters that sharpened the sense of a collision between East and West: the Gulf War of 199091, the rise of al-Qaeda, the September 11 attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In the years after our conversation about the Danish cartoons, Iraq descended into civil war. Ali reluctantly joined the wave of refugees fleeing the country. He was luckier than most; with his superb education and wide network of friends, he reached the United States and got a job teaching at one of the countrys best universities. He was not oblivious to the irony that the collapse of his country had given him a better lifein many respectsthan he could have led in Iraq.
Ali remained an admirer of Salman Rushdie. About a decade ago, he went to a public reading, and was disappointed to find that the novelist would appear only by video link because of the ongoing danger to his life. During the isolation that came with the pandemic in 2020, Ali told me, he paid for a subscription to an online writing course that featured Rushdie. I watched him for hours, he said.
Over the years, Alis perspective on freedom of speech changed. He came to feel that words can only be fought with words, as he told me. He resented the arrogance of religious figures from any culture who value their sensibilities more than human lives. He also felt embarrassed at the way Arab and Islamic publishers censor and bowdlerize their own literary tradition. He told me how he had bought a copy of One Thousand and One Nights, the great medieval folktale collection, during a trip to Mosul with his aunt when he was 9 years old. He didnt understand the sexual references in the stories, and when he asked his parents, they just smiled and told him to keep reading. Today, Ali said, it would probably be hard to find such an uncensored version in an Arab bookstore. Many contemporary authors who write on sensitive subjects see their books banned.
In a sense, the attempt on Rushdies life marked a bookend for Ali. He had first been challenged to think beyond the Islamic orthodoxy of his childhood by reading The Satanic Verses. Now, reading the Arab medias coverage of the attack, he was sickened and enraged to see some people praising the would-be killer and calling him a hero. The entire 33-year campaign against Rushdie, he felt, was motivated not by genuine religious feeling but by cynical political agendas and sectarian grievances. He had become a full-fledged believer in freedom of speech, and a defender of Rushdie and others like him.
But as Alis views shifted, he found himself noticing a curious irony: Many of the people around him in the West were moving in the opposite direction. At the university where he now teaches, strenuous efforts are being made to respect students beliefs and sensitivities, to avoid offense. Speakers who might upset students are less likely to be invited. The goals are progressive, but the methods feel reminiscent to him of theocrats from the world he thought he had left behind.
It is strange, Ali told me. Nowadays, if you want to criticize Jesus, thats okay. But if you criticize Muhammad, wellthis might be a problem. Because people will say youre offending the Muslims.
So they will. The same demands for respect will come from other believers, sacred or secular. Rushdies own insistence on the right to blaspheme has always been ecumenical. If youre offended, he once said, its your problem.
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Reading Rushdie in Iraq - The Atlantic